Advances in patient care have helped to dramatically increase patients' lifespan and quality of life through the development of more effective treatments, medications, and medical technologies. Despite these advances, a leading cause of medical patient fatalities is accidental patient non-compliance with pharmaceutical dosage programs. For example, many patients often forget to take their medications, take too many doses of their medications, take the wrong medications, or take their medications in an incorrect manner. Additionally, some patients even forget to fill their prescriptions in the first place. As a result, taking medications in a non-compliant fashion often leads to a prolonging of disease-related symptoms, an increase in serious complications, unnecessary additional medical visits, higher medical costs, and possibly even death.
People often use the assistance of calendars, physicians, other people, their own memory, and other methods to help remind them to take a particular medication or to help verify that they took the medication according to the proper regimen. However, such methods often fail to adequately remind the patient to take their medications on a regular basis or in an effective manner. Such methods further fail to verify that the patient actually took the medication appropriately.
Additionally, it is generally difficult to determine the state of medications. For example, in the case of medications that need to be stored at specific temperatures, it is difficult to determine whether or not the required storage conditions for the medication have been maintained throughout the storage life of the product.
The issues described above are generally not limited to the field of medications. Commoditization of products, both medical and non-medical, has lead to the extensive use of pre-packaging of products. However, current labeling techniques generally make it difficult for users to ascertain the state of the product, especially in the case of perishable goods. For example, although perishable goods (e.g., frozen goods) may include an expiration date, this date is generally based on specific storage conditions (e.g., the goods were continually stored in a freezer). As a result, buyers of such perishable goods must assume that the sellers have followed proper storage practices for the goods, which may or may not be accurate.
Similar issues arise with respect to determining the extent to which prepackaged goods have been used and whether any other events have occurred that have affected the quality and thus the value of the goods.